Chapter 12 Saying It in the Pan Room

She went down to the pans at eight o'clock on the Thursday with the leaf in the front of her coat, because she had nowhere else to put a thing of that shape, and her grandmother was sitting on the stool in the middle of the pan room with her coat on and the fire lit and no intention of going up. The last boil was in two days. There was a man from the company in the front pan house putting a board across the firebox, and there was a smell of new tar on the boards, and out on the flats the tide was in and the whole of the Long Ebb was lying under water where it would stay until October. "You're not to open that fire," Cerys said. "I'm not opening it." "You've come down with the leaf in your hand and you've been carrying it since noon, I can see the shape of it." "Then I have." Her grandmother moved her feet to make room on the stool's other side, which took some doing, and did not offer it. "Sit down," she said. "It's the last fire I'll light on a Monday." Hesper sat on the edge of the bench with the leaf not in her hand. "I want the family's account of it." "You've got the family's account of it. That's what that is." "That is the Ledger's account of it. The Ledger is a book that the bay wrote by accident and that we copied out." Hesper put her hands on her knees. "I want to know why. Not what. Why." Cerys looked at the fire for a while. Then she said: "Because we were the ones that did it." The fire had a low crack in it, like a man turning over. "Sent down," said her grandmother. "Six in 1849. Five in 1851. Four in 1893. Three in 1919. Three in 1933. Three in 1973. And every single one of them put on the low water at the top of the Steps by a Saltwyke woman with a lamp, out of this room, in front of the ward, on a morning when the Steps were out and the water was out with them." "Mererid's mother told me there was never anybody sent. She told me the whole of it when she was dying. She said, we kept the lamp and we kept the salt and we said nothing asked, and there was a woman called Saltwyke on that causeway every forty years for four hundred years and nobody has ever gone missing off this bay." "Your gran's mother told your gran that in a bed in a house in Ildwater when the both of them were frightened," Cerys said, "and she told it to her because she had decided there was going to be a lying in this family and she wanted to know where to put it. And it is where I found it." "So the whole of it is a lie." "No. The whole of it is a lie with the salt still in it. We sent them. We sent every one of them that our family had any business sending, because the book says we did, and we wrote it down, and the writing down was the point. That is the family skill, Hesper. It isn't keeping secrets. There are hardly any secrets. It's that this house has been the one that tells this bay who to be sorry about, and a family that tells the bay who to be sorry about can't be in the list itself." "That's the Tidewarden." "That's the Tidewarden and that's the salt and that's the house and that's the lamp. All one thing. Everything this family has ever had came out of the right to be the one that keeps the account." Her grandmother's hands lay open on her knees. "So when one of our own was on the list in 1893, she had to come off it. There was no other way to hold the two together. You cannot be the one that writes the list and be on the list. So somebody struck her through and wrote that she was not taken, in the family hand, on the family page, and went on sitting at that desk." "Who?" "The woman herself." Hesper's hands had gone still on her knees. "Her own name struck through. In her own hand. NT after it." "It's in a fair hand and it's in the same ink and it's the same size as the rest of the line and I have looked at it for forty years with a glass." Cerys leaned forward. "She did it the night before. She sat at the desk in this room in September of 1893 with the tide out and the Steps out, and she struck herself off the page and wrote that she wasn't taken, because she had worked it out and because she was going to go out on the low water in the morning with the rest of them and she wanted the house to be able to carry on when she was not in it." "And then she went and wrote her name in the tally underneath." "She went and wrote her name in the tally underneath," said Cerys. "That's the leaf, Hesper. That's the whole of what you burnt with the bread knife in 1953. There's the lie at the top of the line in her own writing, and there's the truth at the foot of the page in her own writing, and they are four inches apart on the same sheet and they were written within an hour of each other by a woman who had decided to do both." Nobody said anything for a while. On the second fire, out in the pan house, the man working had gone home and the boards were cooling and making that sound that boards make. "She wrote both," said Hesper. "She wrote both, and the family kept them both, and there's been a hundred and sixty years of people in that front room looking at that sheet and seeing whichever half they could live with." "What was her name?" "No." "Gran—" "No," said Cerys, and her voice had an edge on it that Hesper had not heard since she was a girl of nine. "You'll not have it off me. It isn't that I don't trust you. It's that a name given out loud in a room like this one goes out of the window and into the water and it's not like the others. The others are on a page. A name said in a room is on about four hundred people." "Then I'll get it out of the book." "There is no book. There is a stub and a hole and a roll that a company is going to put in a box on Friday, and there is no more name in any of it, and I have had it in my head for sixty-four years and I shall take it with me and it will be the last thing I have that nobody can take off me." Hesper stood up. "You've just told me she went out on the low water in the morning and got back by the road, or didn't get back at all, and I've got the page in my coat, and I'm going to have to write something on a fresh sheet of paper and paste it in where it was." "I know what you're going to do." "Are you going to stop me?" "No," said her grandmother. "It's all I've got left to do with it. Sit down, Hesper. You came down here to be told something and I've told you and you can go up now, and in twenty years you'll be sat in a kitchen somewhere with a daughter of your own asking you the same thing, and you'll do the same as me and say there's nothing in it." Hesper sat down. The fire went down and down and nobody fed it. The tide had come right up the bank and was under the door, an inch, the way it came in a westerly, and the water under the door was black and moved. Then Cerys said it. She said it to the fire, and she said it in the ordinary voice of a woman saying a thing out loud in a room where it had not been said for a hundred and twenty-four years, and it was five letters, and it was the name. "It was my grandmother's name as well," Hesper said. "Aye." "And hers." "And hers," Cerys said. "And your mother's aunt before that. We give it out like a raffle. Every so often somebody puts it on a girl in this family and the woman says nothing and everybody pretends not to notice, and I've watched it happen four times in my life." "Who's keeping the list?" "There's no list." "There's always a list," said Hesper. "And you'll be dead, and then it'll be mine, and I'll have never been told what it's a list of." Above the door of the pan house the sky had gone to a colour Ismay would one day see every evening of her childhood without knowing where she had first seen it, on a flat grey stone between Sallowry and the bank, with the water coming up under the door and two women on a bench in front of a fire that neither of them was going to feed again. "That's a thing to have on you at thirty-two," said Cerys. "Yes," said Hesper. ---